Editor-in-Chief
Brown University Alpert Medical School
Nihaal Mehta is a member of the Class of 2020 at Brown University Alpert School of Medicine. Originally from Lexington, MA, he also attended Brown for college, graduating in 2014 with a degree in Health and Human Biology and subfocus in Global Health.
Nihaal’s interests lie in medicine and its intersections: with health systems, policy, and the humanities. In college, he worked as a Writing Fellow, a Teaching Assistant for biology and public health courses, and assisted in the design of a course that examines controversies in medicine. Before returning to Brown for medical school, he spent a year working in consulting on health care business, strategy, and policy. He plans to specialize in Ophthalmology, and has conducted research focused on optical coherence tomography and retinal disease.
When you pick a residency, the name is irrelevant, where you go is irrelevant, your score is irrelevant. If you don’t like the people, your life will be miserable.
When you leave medical school and go to your residency, what you realize is it’s a lot more than OnlineMedEd. No kidding — pelvic anatomy is a 20-minute video. Turns out there’s more to know than that. If you’re going to become a gynecologist who does surgery, you’re going to learn a hell of a lot more than I teach there.
As institutions of higher learning are becoming increasingly diverse, the portraiture that hangs in these institutions should reflect the bodies that inhabit their halls. Here, I argue that recency is particularly needed in academic medicine, and will propose some strategies for achieving it in our academic medical centers.
The in-Training Editors-in-Chief, Nihaal Mehta and Amelia Mackarey, talked to Dr. Dustyn Williams and Jamie Fitch, co-founders of OnlineMedEd, one of the most widely-used educational resources by medical students around the world.
The in-Training Editors-in-Chief, Nihaal Mehta and Amelia Mackarey, talked to Dr. Dustyn Williams and Jamie Fitch, co-founders of OnlineMedEd, one of the most widely-used educational resources by medical students around the world.
Nationally, our current medical education model fails to address the fundamental tenets of the U.S. health care system, health care policy, and business management. Despite the recent major shift in health care policy, medical schools have proved universally inept at equipping future doctors with the knowledge and tools they need to influence policy in their professional field and to thrive in their careers.
They say to become truly educated is to begin to realize how little you really know. I used to not understand this — it seemed the more I learned, the more I knew. How could it be different? This changed in medical school. It was only then that I began to feel more and more ignorant with each passing day of my education.
Walking into the conference room for grand rounds, I took a deep breath. I was terrified. My biggest fear was that I would hate it — hate the time spent in neurosurgery, hate the American health care system and even just hate surgery over medicine.
The last year of medical school heralds more than just the end of an era. It brings with it the confidence in a career choice doubted several times just a year ago.
With constant attention to our mission, the in-Training Board regularly brainstorms new ways to reach our peers and serve the medical student community.
The point of my story is to outline a scenario that many of us as students have probably experienced: being the target of a superior’s anger. This isn’t the first time that an attending or senior has treated me poorly and unfortunately, it won’t be the last.
The most stressful part of the medical school application process for me was the last phase, when there was nothing I could do except wait to hear back. I feel most content when I know there are concrete actions I can take to influence an outcome I care about.
Contributing Writer
Boston University School of Medicine
Emily Regier is a second-year medical student at Boston University School of Medicine. She graduated from Brown University in 2014 with a degree in biology and spent two years working in healthcare journalism before medical school. Her academic interests include primary care, women's health, and addiction medicine, and she enjoys singing, running, and spending time with friends and family.
